After trying Arcane for the first few pulls, I agree that Fire is probably the best for this fight. AoE on the adds in the 3rd phase is pretty important. However, I'm unsure if running with PoM or Scorch would be better in terms of burning down the Sparks. I have a little bit of trouble getting the last set just because I feel the cast time of Fireball is a little long. I used Scorch almost exclusively on the Elementium Bolt on Deathwing and found that to be better (more spells, more chance to crit, more chance to proc a Pyroblast!).

Between sparks spam scorch on boss to try and procc heating up, keep it up and use inferno > insta pyro on the spark. Lots of burst is needed in order to push up to 6/7 sparks. Also with the tactic we used i needed to get to the spark on the other side of the room, by taking scorch i could still keep some dmg up on the boss.

Between sparks spam scorch on boss to try and procc heating up, keep it up and use inferno > insta pyro on the spark. Lots of burst is needed in order to push up to 6/7 sparks. Also with the tactic we used i needed to get to the spark on the other side of the room, by taking scorch i could still keep some dmg up on the boss.

Are you talking about 10m or 25m? 6/7 sparks is extremely hard in 10m without having only burst damage dealer. We are going with twice 4 sparks, 2 protectors in first P1 and 3 in 2nd P1 - should be enough to kill the boss in almost 2mins for last P1 until enrage with 2 healers (1,9% wipe :/ :/ )

I ended up going Arcane and parsed World #2 Arcane Mage (I was only under #1 by a fractional amount!) but was then disappointed to learn that there were only 10 parses total and thus it isn't really all that impressive.
My only real issue was placing Rune of Power, other than that it seemed a very good fight for Arcane Mages. The sparks were incredibly easy to break (I could even get off a 6 stack ABarr on 3/6 of them quite reliably).
I was quite pleased considering that I hadn't even played the spec since the big patch, outside of a quick 2-man run of Ulduar 10 earlier in the day!

The top parses are all as Fire so you might want to try that yourself, I am confident that with a bit more practice I could top the current Frost parses with Arcane though. As getting sparks down reliably still seems to be my group's major stumbling block I'm not going to swap spec to Fire quite yet as that seems to be its weakness.

The tip about the "sweet spot" at the edge of the ring was incredibly helpful.

I ended up going Arcane and parsed World #2 Arcane Mage (I was only under #1 by a fractional amount!) but was then disappointed to learn that there were only 10 parses total and thus it isn't really all that impressive.
My only real issue was placing Rune of Power, other than that it seemed a very good fight for Arcane Mages. The sparks were incredibly easy to break (I could even get off a 6 stack ABarr on 3/6 of them quite reliably).
I was quite pleased considering that I hadn't even played the spec since the big patch, outside of a quick 2-man run of Ulduar 10 earlier in the day!

The top parses are all as Fire so you might want to try that yourself, I am confident that with a bit more practice I could top the current Frost parses with Arcane though. As getting sparks down reliably still seems to be my group's major stumbling block I'm not going to swap spec to Fire quite yet as that seems to be its weakness.

The tip about the "sweet spot" at the edge of the ring was incredibly helpful.

I personally feel that fire is best spec for elegon, we downed him yesterday and I got 121k dps to it on 10m as fire.

i just had a feeling fire will suffer during orb phase, simply they need to waste a gcd on mage bomb to get that 15% increased damage on fireball/pyroblast, maybe this will be more punishing when its comes to heroic, unlike arcane you can control your arcane charges and have a much better sustained burst but we shall see ya?? :P

Yeah, I've been frost for yesterday (3h of elegon wiping, we almost got him, will die on wednesday) and what I noticed is, I'm doing pretty bad dps there. I've being outdpsing every dps in my guild on the first 4 bosses (by several k) but now I'm doing pretty bad. I know frozen orb is bugged now (freeze is not, at least for me), but if you come close to the boss it will work just fine (I time it with my instants so I don't lose dps so all should be fine). I literally have no idea, what might I do wrong? Also, what I've seen in logs is, most people use frost bomb as frost here, but as fire they use living bomb. I thought masteries don't give + to frost/fire damage anymore, so why is that? And do you maybe have some tricks for frost mage here? Because really, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but I have no idea what it is. I can't provide logs :/

Phase two as fire (on 10 man) is a pain. I cannot seem to spread my bombs from the boss to the adds, which means I need to apply bomb individually, wasting a gcd, and then hope for a fireball crit to get some burst on it. I see no reason to play anything but fire for p1 and p3 though.

But is it worth it to go fire just for one fight? I mean, if I go fire, I have to go fire for all fights (you know, gathering gear, gems, enchants etc, I won't be stacking crit as frost). Is fire doing at least as good as frost on all fights? Logs say yes, but you know about logs, fire is rng so it has higher dps spread and I can't find any median. :/ I guess I'll have to test it on myself. I hate it, it was so fun to play frost and now I'm forced to go fire to contribute my best to the raid.

If you are Frost you will have been trying to gather items that have either hit/haste or haste/crit on them, which means that with a very minimal amount of reforging they will still be fairly powerful for Fire. For one encounter that should not be an issue.
Frost gears Haste > Crit > Mastery and Fire gears Crit > Haste > Mastery (and still wants Haste > Crit until certain percentages of Haste).

I been reading and reading all over the place about this fight and still don't have not much of a clue as to what spec is the best or how people are managing their rotations throughout the fight.

I have played both fire and frost for quite a few runs and so far they are both lack luster. In fire you are hoping and praying to get a heating up proc and get your pyros off on the boss to get some decent dmg, with fire right now crit is extremely low so I have gone 6 to 7 cast of fireball before hitting a heating up and then trying to get my pyro. It seems people who are parsing the highest are getting lucky and getting quite a few crits towards the end or beginning and that is how they are topping the logs, looking at their whole fight it seems they are just low throughout. Also, how is fire dealing with the sparks, you have no burst dmg at all and your praying that you can get a pyro. I have to be with another guy to help because i can't reliably take down 5 sparks each time in 10M.

Most attempts I have been frost and what I see here is the dps is low at the beginning and starts to pick up some toward the later part of the fight. I save my orb for sparks to get some extra procs and I use my pets freeze on the add that comes up and the sparks to get some extra procs. Most of the time I can get sparks down decently, but you get most of your dmg once you have 3 stacks of FB on a target. I have done ok for the fight but so far my dps is at the bottom, but the main thing is that the sparks are dieing and we are getting 6 stacks, so I am willing to suffer my dps to ensure that the sparks are down each time.

I was thinking of doing Arcane tonight to see if there is a real difference in what I can do and not do.

What I am looking for is for people who have downed the fight in 10M, either fire or frost can you tell me what you are doing to reliably take down the sparks and what you are doing to manage your pyros or is it all about luck of the draw in fire as usual and hoping and praying. With frost what are you doing to squeeze our more dps, since freeze and ur orb doesn't seem to affect Elegon unless that has changed recently which I didn't try last night on him. Again thanks for your time and for reading this post.

Did the fight as fire last night, inbetween each spark spawning just spam fireball on the boss and hope that you're lucky. Had around 27% crit chance and every now and then you will have to just call out and ask for help. I took Presence of Mind over scorch due to the fact that I prefer it for fights where you stand still and it's also nice if you don't get an instant Pyro.

Can't link armory, but I'm Veiigar on Bladefist if you need proof for whatever reason.

When I was Frost I could usually do fairly ok on the sparks by maintaining Invocate, keeping Frost Bomb up on Elegon so I could start with a FFB and use another one before the spark reached and then spamming FB into the boss in hope that I'd have some Ice Lances charges to make things easier before it spawned
I saved Freeze and Frost Orb for the fifth and sixth, though you can probably get away with also Freezing one of the first if you so desire

Frozen orb also doesnt hit elegon. It is quite a dramatic damage loss when you count in all the FoF procs youre missing out on. The protectors come up very rarely and briefly in the encounter so using freeze on them isnt ideal. Ultimately, I went fire for it once I realized frost wasnt working properly. As fire I was saving my hot streaks during the charge phase for the charges. We got through 6-7 per phase no worries. While my damage was lower than the other mages in my team as fire, I was doing a substantial amount more damage on the charges. 3.79mil

It seems a little easier to go fire in 25 man, since you are able to have multiple people per sparks, but when it comes to 10M it is a little more difficult IMO. I could be totally wrong on this, even though there are some really great fire dps in fire on WOL. I just can't see how to get sparks down if your not procing and if your really unlucky then your kinda screwed when the sparks come out.

Killed elegon on sunday with my guild. I ran as frost and somthing i noticed from doing him on thursday is that as frost if you use your freeze near the back of elegon (so basicaly get your freeze as far centered into his body as you can) you will get FoF stacks. I was at 101k DPS at the end of the fight and we had got 5 stacks the 1st set of adds and 4 the 2nd. and my talents were scorch, frost bomb, and rune of power (found rune better than incanters for add waves.)
I tried fire out earlier but didn't like it since because of the travel time by the time your 1st fireball hits, you have about .2 seconds left on your second fireball cast, and if the 1st one crits that only gives you .2 seconds to react to use infernoblast instead of fireball so i was losing to many hot streaks.